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Writing in today's NYT Magazine, Erica Goode summarizes Robert Putnam's recent research on diversity and social capital:
What if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or town led residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who looked like them? What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home watching television in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood barbecue or joining a community project?
This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes in the June issue of the journal Scandinavian Political Studies. “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
The full story after the jump.
Putnam's new work is more complex than previously, showing evidence of clear benefits from diversity. And there is overlap between his notion of bridging social capital and my team's work on diversity, which he clearly notes: "Diversity has clear benefits, Putnam says, among them economic growth and enhanced creativity — more top-flight scientists, more entrepreneurs, more artists. But difference is also disconcerting, he maintains, “and people like me, who are in favor of diversity, don’t do ourselves any favors by denying that it takes time to become comfortable,” Putnam says.
There are lots of reasons which could account for this association between places with high levels of diversity and high levels of social isolation. One that reflects recent work of my team is that places with high levels of diversity also have high levels of migration. High levels of migration make it harder to forge trust. Moreover, our hunch is that migrants reflect particular kinds of personality types which are more likely to seek out new experiences and less likely to be rooted in personal relationships.
What do you think?
Idea Lab
Home Alone
For decades, students of American society have offered dueling theories about how encountering racial and ethnic diversity affects the way we live. One says that simple contact — being tossed into a stew of different cultures, values, languages and styles of dress — is likely to nourish tolerance and trust. Familiarity, in this view, trumps insularity. Others argue that just throwing people together is rarely enough to breed solidarity: when diversity increases, they assert, people tend to stick to their own groups and distrust those who are different from them.
But what if diversity had an even more complex and pervasive effect? What if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or town led residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who looked like them? What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home watching television in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood barbecue or joining a community project?
This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes in the June issue of the journal Scandinavian Political Studies. “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
In highly diverse cities and towns like Los Angeles, Houston and Yakima, Wash., the survey found, the residents were about half as likely to trust people of other races as in homogenous places like Fremont, Mich., or rural South Dakota, where, Putnam noted, “diversity means inviting a few Norwegians to the annual Swedish picnic.”
More significant, they were also half as likely to trust people of their own race. They claimed fewer close friends. They were more apt to agree that “television is my most important form of entertainment.” They had less confidence in local government and less confidence in their own ability to exert political influence. They were more likely to join protest marches but less likely to register to vote. They rated their happiness as generally lower. And this diversity effect continued to show up even when a community’s population density, average income, crime levels, rates of home ownership and a host of other factors were taken into account.
It was not a result that Putnam, the author of the much-discussed 2000 book “Bowling Alone,” was looking for when he sat down six years ago to examine the mass of data he had collected. He was hoping to build on his earlier work, which described a precipitous decline in the nation’s “social capital,” the formal and informal networks — bowling leagues, parent-teacher associations, fraternal organizations, pick-up basketball games, youth service groups — that tie people together, shore up civic engagement and forge bonds of trust and reciprocity. Now he wanted to find out more about how social capital varied regionally and over time.
But the diversity finding was so surprising that Putnam said his first thought was that maybe something was wrong with the data. He and his research team spent five years testing other explanations. Maybe people in more diverse areas had less political clout and thus fewer amenities, like playgrounds and pothole-free streets, putting them in a misanthropic mood; or maybe diversity caused “hunkering down” only in people who were older or richer or white or female. But the effect did not go away. When colleagues who heard about the results protested, “I bet you haven’t thought about X” — a frequent occurrence, Putnam said — the researchers went back and looked at X.
The idea that it is diversity (the researchers used the census’s standard racial categories to define diversity) that drives social capital down has its critics. Among them is Steven Durlauf, an economist at the University of Wisconsin and a critic of Putnam’s past work, who said he thinks some other characteristic, as yet unidentified, explains the lowered trust and social withdrawal of people living in diverse areas. But without clear evidence to the contrary, Putnam says, he has to believe the conclusion is solid.
Few would question that it is provocative. The public discourse on diversity runs at a high temperature. Told by one side, the narrative of how different ethnic and racial groups come together in schools, workplaces, churches and shopping centers can sound as if it was lifted from “Sesame Street.” Told by the other, it often carries the shrill tones of a recent caller to a radio talk show on immigration reform: “The school my kid goes to is 45 percent Mexican,” he said, “and I don’t see this as being a good thing for this country. Do we want to turn into a Latin American country?”
Putnam’s argument is more nuanced. Diversity has clear benefits, he says, among them economic growth and enhanced creativity — more top-flight scientists, more entrepreneurs, more artists. But difference is also disconcerting, he maintains, “and people like me, who are in favor of diversity, don’t do ourselves any favors by denying that it takes time to become comfortable,” Putnam says.
Why that discomfort seems to translate into social isolation and a weakening of civic bonds remains anyone’s guess. Studies by Wendy Berry Mendes, a social psychologist at Harvard, and her colleagues find that when research subjects play a cooperative game with someone of another race, they can show physiological signs of distress — reduced cardiac efficiency and arterial constriction, for example. On a daily basis, this alarmed reaction might make people pull inward. Putnam himself speculates that, with kaleidoscopic changes going on around them, people in diverse communities might experience a kind of system overload, shutting down “in the presence of confusing or multiple messages from the environment.”
Still, in Putnam’s view, the findings are neither cause for despair nor a brief against diversity. If this country’s history is any guide, what people perceive as unfamiliar and disturbing — what they see as “other” — can and does change over time. Seemingly intractable group divisions can give way to a larger, overarching identity. When he was in high school in the 1950s, Putnam notes, he knew the religion of almost every one of the 150 students in his class. At the time, religious intermarriage was uncommon, and knowing whether a potential mate was a Methodist, a Catholic or a Jew was crucial information. Half a century later, for most Americans, the importance of religion as a mating test has dwindled to near irrelevance, “hardly more important than left- or right-handedness to romance.”
The rising marriage rates across racial and ethnic lines in a younger generation, raised in a more diverse world, suggest the current markers of difference can also fade in salience. In some places, they already have: soldiers have more interracial friendships than civilians, Putnam’s research finds, and evangelical churches in the South show high rates of racial integration. “If you’re asking me if, in the long run, I’m optimistic,” Putnam says, “the answer is yes.”
I appreciate your comments on my work, Richard, but before getting too far in your response, you might want to read the full 37-page article, not just a short newspaper summary. It appears at http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x. You'll see there that that our analysis controls not merely for the mobility of the individual respondent, but simultaneously (and independently) for the mobility of her neighbors, as well as a dozens of other background variables. Mobility is not a confounding variable in our analysis.
Bob
Posted by: Bob Putnam | June 17, 2007 at 08:52 PM
Bob, I'm eager to read this article, but the link you provided gives an error message that the article is not in the system.
Posted by: Sandy | June 18, 2007 at 06:29 AM
Bob - Thank you for your comment. First off, let me say that I have come to appreciate your research and findings, overall, more and more over time. In our own research, we have found considerable overlap with your construct of bridging capital. And I do agree with much of your findings on diversity, as I tried to say. My own field work for Rise indicated as much. We found highly educated, highly skilled (and especially younger) demographics drawn to what we came to term the "quasi-anonymity" of urban life. This is also what Robert Park found long ago, and what William Whyte really was saying about his "organization man" suburbs. I have been reading a great deal about the causes and consequences of social isolation, all stemming from your work, and find myself in agreement with much if it. The point of my post is that we will be doing much more on individual level personality constructs working with Jason Renfrew and testing large personality data sets developed by Renfrew along with Sam Gosling and by Martin Seligman and Chris Peterson. Our notion is that personality may well effect these kinds of outcomes, as certain types not only are drawn to but cluster in certain locations. Our team would be very interested in sharing data sets and conducting joint analysis.
Posted by: Richard | June 18, 2007 at 09:35 AM
You can access the full text from here:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/scps/30/2
Posted by: Kevin Stolarick | June 18, 2007 at 10:33 AM
I'll try to look at the longer paper later as this may be covered...
The benefits of diversity might best be measured at a generational level, especially the benefits to people, the economy and society of a multi-ethnic neighbourhood.
The immigrants to the neighbourhood themselves, the parents, may tend to associate mostly with the few others from their background living nearby.
But their kids mix and mingle, at school and on the playground forming deep friendships with those of other backgrounds. Having children who are good friends in turn breaks down barriers between the parents and also, long term, creates adults comfortable in multi-ethnic environments.
Posted by: Wendy | June 18, 2007 at 11:57 AM
Thanks, Kevin.
Posted by: sandy | June 18, 2007 at 12:05 PM
Wendy's point is a good one. In our preliminary historical research, it looks as though a generation or two is needed to overcome the "hunkering" effect. The larger point (covered in the last third of my paper) is that this process can be facilitated by efforts (both public and private) to foster identities that cross-cut, rather than just reinforcing, ethnic identities. My guess, Richard, is that these social processes are more potent in the long run than personality traits, though in the short run there are individual differences (~ personality differences) in how quickly people adapt to diversity and change.
PS I won't be posting more here for a while, as I'm about to begin a long trip abroad.
Posted by: Bob Putnam | June 19, 2007 at 01:42 AM
Bob - Let's figure out a way to compare these two. We have the personality data just about clean and ready for geographic matching, with specific probes about trust. Have a great trip!
Posted by: Richard | June 19, 2007 at 11:00 AM
Bob - One more comment from personal experience. My grandparents were all immigrants from southern Italy. They were very "hunkered." My parent's generation, 7 children on each side, were almost equally hunkered. Only two of these 14 married outside our ethnic group. Most of the entire family remained in close proximity (perhaps a 5-10 mile radius) of my grandparents' homes in Newark's north ward. Even today, most of my extended family is located in that region and remains very hunkered. Just a handful of my cousins have college degrees, and few moved far distances. I am an outlier, certainly. But I think the differentiating factor in my case is rooted in some sort of personality characteristic - drive, ambition or what psychologists call "openness to experience." My parents told me my school teachers (nuns in Catholic school) identified this as early as the first-grade. Now I certainly maintain many "bridging" ties and am less "bonded" than they, but I also remain somewhat socially isolated, having moved so many times.
I thoroughly enjoyed the personal anecdote in your article where you discuss your neighborhood. I live in a similar neighborhood in northwest Washington DC, with lots of BBQs and cocktail parties. I have yet to go to one, though my wife, Rana, does help to maintain some of our ties.
Safe travels,
Posted by: Richard | June 19, 2007 at 11:08 AM
In our preliminary historical research, it looks as though a generation or two is needed to overcome the hunkering effect.My parents told me my school teachers (nuns in Catholic school) identified this as early as the first-grade. Now I certainly maintain many "bridging" ties and am less "bonded" than they, but I also remain somewhat socially isolated, having moved so many times.
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